Re: [address@hidden: Suggestions to GNU Standards]

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 10:22:08PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
     What do people think of these ideas?
     
     
     1) For Character Set, replace ASCII with UTF-8. As the former is
     phasing out and being replaced by the latter.


This has been a controversial thing over the years.  My opinion is that
it is not yet Okay to declare ascii dead.  There are still terminals
which cannot handle UTF-8.  What we currently say is to use ASCII unless
there is a good reason to require a more comprehensive character set, in
which case use UTF-8.    I think that's how it should stay - at least
for now.

     2) For Fonts, there are no recommendations mentioned. Make GNU FreeFont
     and/or GNU UniFont as recommended fonts. So that fonts are consistent
     among all GNU Packages/Programs.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean.  "Programs" don't "use"
fonts.  Some programs are capable of rendering text in a font (usually
of the user's choice).   It might make sense to have a recommendation
for typeset documents.  But by default we use Texinfo for documentation,
and TeX doesn't use either of the two fonts that the writer mentions.


J'